Moment 71 - Why You SHOULD Take Personal Responsibility: Matthew Hussey

00:02One of the three lines of like, I guess, business, but life in general, and also with relationships is and I really wanted to ask you this, because it's something that I'd seen in my DMs from people, people sometimes message me about relationships. And one of the things that I find concerning when I meet someone in their personal development journey, or in my DMs talking about their boyfriend, or in other facets of business, is when I identify a lack of personal and self responsibility, where you meet certain people in life, where they just can never seem to take responsibility they never want to like look in the mirror and ask themselves the question what role have i played in this and i sat with lewis in london on this podcast about a week ago or two weeks ago something and one of the things that really astounded me about lewis was when he said something about his ex-partner even if it was it seemed like a fault on the surface he would say and that's on me and then end the little the the paragraph with why he was responsible even if it was like you know she wouldn't let me have females on my podcast or something like that then he'd say and that's on me and I remember thinking damn this guy's gonna go far so what role have you seen that taking personal responsibility has

01:09on the the positivity of your outcomes in dating life business and everything in between mean well i think that to start with it it makes you a much more likable person amen the idea of extreme ownership is a in some ways powerful but we all know there are things that have happened in life that are not our fault at all there are things that we trauma we have experienced that it would be insulting to say that we have to take responsibility for these things uh it would be sinister in some cases to suggest that but if we can get into the habit of genuinely saying you know how this how this is affecting me is something I can take responsibility for.

02:07And if I do, it actually gives me a shot at feeling better about this thing. It actually gives me a chance of improving it. Because if I say I'm powerless, then I can't have it both ways. I can't say I'm powerless and I have no responsibility over how I feel and then make it better. i have to say okay this thing is happening it's not that it's happening is not my fault that someone is making my life really really difficult right now with what they're doing their behavior their abuse their whatever that is not my fault but i want to get really curious about how I can handle this in a better way, in a more productive way.

02:57And the one of the things, our mutual friend, Lewis Howes, who you're talking about, one of the beautiful things about him, both in front of the camera and behind the camera, is that he is, Lewis is not a complainer. Lewis is someone who, he'll talk about the things that he's struggling with right now, or he'll talk about the things that he's trying to work on. But it's never from a place of being the victim. It's always from a place of what can I do?

03:32Which I think is different. People, I think part of the problem for a lot of people is they conflate the idea of ownership with fault. And that takes us into some really dangerous territory. It's not your fault that something's happening. but you can take responsibility for how you how you turn that into art i i thought about um i thought about confidence a lot in my career and the injustices of confidence right because we are not distributed things equally in life we are not distributed things equally at birth we're not distributed opportunities equally you know it's super easy for anyone who's objectively decent looking to talk about you know how easy it is to go and approach someone or do this or do that and you're like you cannot even imagine what it is for someone who has been rejected their entire lives they are starting from a completely different position than you in their confidence.

04:43It's so easy for someone to say, you just need to be confident. Okay, start from where I'm starting from and then tell me that. You know, confidence is a really, again, it can be a very insulting concept. But I do believe that there's a TV show called Chopped and I'm probably, I'm not familiar with the show, but so I'm probably going to get wrong the concept that in my head, the concept of this show is very, very interesting from the point of view of confidence. I think the chefs get given different ingredients. So it's like just lucky dip. What do you get? What's interesting is if you get a basket of ingredients and I get a basket of ingredients, we're both getting judged on what we make of those ingredients in that format it's what are you able to do with what you have and what am i able to do with what i have and i think there's something really fascinating about that because we spend so much of our lives mourning our ingredients really being upset or frustrated about what the ingredients are that we were given imagine that you're not being judged on anything but how great a chef you are because that show isn't about ingredients it's about chefs or imagine life isn't about ingredients it's about chefs

06:16don't aspire to have the best ingredients aspire to be the best chef and the best chef is going to be the one who can be the most creative with the ingredients that they have i i'm fascinated by that because if i apply that to my own life i just go whatever thing that just happened i wish didn't happen whatever thing that's happened to me this year that is so painful so devastating so whatever whatever that thing is it just became a new ingredient in my life i can either judge myself or my ingredients which if i do that i'm always at the mercy of the next thing that happens in my life something cataclysmic could happen in my life and and i lose everything and then what i'm going to judge myself and my life on my ingredients it to me it's always how great of a chef are you ingredients are luck of the draw being a chef is something we can continue to get better at our entire lives and it's actually the antidote to whatever happens if you're a great chef you can cook something out of whatever you have it's such a it's such a powerful analogy and it really really did like yeah i i sort of do what you probably do when you hear an analogy you kind of test it from multiple scenarios and it really stands up and i

07:44was thinking then again about when we look into that basket of the ingredients we're handed if we believe that the ingredients we were handed are inadequate or inferior to the chef stood next to us, we're probably also going to prepare the meal with a certain level of pessimism that's going to result in a worse dish anyway. And the agony also of looking over at someone else's basket of ingredients and going, fucking hell, they got the ribeye, look at me.

08:06And that, you know, because we both know the negative power of comparison and how it can drive down performance, belief, confidence and all those things. But it's a beautiful, beautiful analogy. And sometimes imagine if you took pride in being able to still make, even if you knew like this ingredient is, this one sucks. Like there's no getting around it. These ingredients I have right now suck. But you took pride in, look what I can make out of this.

08:34I get you made something amazing with your truffle salt and your caviar and your uni. Like I get you did something amazing with that. No shit. look what I just did with kelp jerky yeah it's a real powerful analogy for privilege as well isn't it 100% because then you realise I'm in a different game altogether this is why comparison is so insidious because what am I going to do? compare myself to someone who got a completely different basket of ingredients and say and by the way the basket of ingredients isn't just what you got in life in terms of circumstances or parents or whatever education your basket of ingredients is also what you got here you have a sharp mind thank you now you've no doubt honed that mind you've respected it you've honored it by reading and by educating yourself and do all of these things but you also started with a sharp mind yeah probably i'm really it's funny because i'm really bad at math english and everything i'm good at the thing i honed but you're right i definitely had a predisposition but your speed of like you hear something and you i've watched you in in in interviews and when you talk your speed of how you assimilate information and draw patterns you're good at pattern recognition which

10:10is why from a philosophical standpoint yeah there's a strength there right because you're good at pattern recognition these things you just won the lottery on that one like with your brain you just happen to win the lottery on that one right that's this is going to be my confidence button i'm going to get this clip i'm going to you won the lottery it's a 60 second emotional button those ingredients extend to everything they extend to everything you you couldn't have grown up in the most dire circumstances but have a sharpness of mind that other people can't even relate to. And for that reason, if you know how to double down on that thing, anything can happen.

10:58I love the idea. And I think that everyone could benefit from a kind of acceptance of just, I'm starting from where I am. Forget starting from when you were a baby and, you know, all of the circumstances you were born into and so on. I'm talking now. Forget what's happened. Forget everything you've done. I had a great brain, but then for 10 years, I did a bunch of drugs and then I hurt myself and then blah, blah, blah, whatever. It doesn't matter. I think about it like this. Imagine that you woke up into your life right now and your only job was to make the most of that life. So forget the years that Stephen has already had your 29 right now. So forget the 29 years that have already happened. You, this brand new soul is waking up this morning into Stephen's body at 29 with whatever his opportunities are and whatever his problems are.

11:52It would be awesome. You'd be so happy for the opportunity.